Range Rover Autobiography: off-road

The seminal Range Rover is 40 years old this year, but it still seems as undaunted by mud and gloop as the day it first rolled off the production line.

Hell or high water: Range Rover Autobiography takes them all in its stridePhoto: JOHN LAWRENCE

By Andrew English

10:59AM GMT 03 Nov 2010

Winnie the Pooh looked incredulously down from the side windows at the axle-deep ooze as the Range Rover galumphed through Land Rover's Jungle in Solihull.

Of course, E H Shepard's Winnie was well used to getting muddy when chasing honey or chasing Woozles, but even Erin's Winnie sunblinds looked a bit daunted by Land Rover's gungeous spread.

Less than half a mile from the security gates of Land Rover's West Midlands factory, the company's infamous Jungle Track contains just about every off-road hazard you are ever likely to meet - with the exception of dry rock beds and sand, this being Solihull.

"Never put your feet where your head hasn't been first and never put your vehicle where your feet haven't been," instructed Malcolm Ainsley, a former Range Rover engineer and now instructor at the Jungle Track.

You've got to be kidding. It's a cliché that you couldn't stand up on the ground we're traversing, but I tried, slipped, fell, filled my shoes with muddy water and retreated back to the cabin to leave brown footprints all over the cream upholstery.

What began in 1970 as Land Rover's upmarket workhorse complete with rubber mats and a hose-out interior is these days a serious luxury car, albeit one with a serious appetite to go where others fear to put their tread. No special tricks, no mud-grabbing tyres. We didn't even alter the pressures.

It was straight into a river bed, complete with hidden pot holes and slippery telegraph-pole bridges which threatened to stem forward progress at every turn.

"These days the driver skill is all about configuring the vehicle, it's about hazard perception," says Ainsley, who nevertheless cautions, "slower and safer," when I charge a hazard known as "the collapsed bridge". Now guess what that entailed.

Configuration is hardly an arduous task in a modern Range Rover, with its dial switch, which sets up the suspension and the electronically controlled differentials according to a series of terrain icons. "Just like a Kodak Instamatic," I mutter. Ainsley seems unimpressed.

The hilly part of the track is part old, part new, consisting of bits of the old Rover test banking now covered in mud, grass, firs and some picturesque rowans.

Switch to the hills icon and the Range Rover romps it. Cross-axled, when the vehicle had just two wheels on the ground, was a condition that struck terror into the 4x4 driver of yore. Our mount whirs slightly as diffs adjust to life in two-wheel drive and crawls forward.

Impossible descents test the departure angles to the max (the tow hitch digs in like a ground anchor), but our Range Rover simple continues forward, feeling as though it is dragging Solihull into Hampton in Arden.

Its competence is so crushing I wonder if owners simply don't get stuck overestimating their ability to get out of the vehicle once they get where they're going. "It has happened," grins Ainsley.

A spray wash and a tyre check for splits inflicted by pesky flints, then they let me loose on the M40 home.

There's something rather special about mixing it with the day's commuter traffic, none of the drivers realising that the car passing them has just scaled K2.